Chapter Ninety-Four: Yun Ranran of the Nine Provinces Academy

According to the information given by Yun Ranran, the one-eyed Taoist ought to be holed up somewhere deep in the mountains before the Lotus Eye.

There was not a single village in sight around this mountain range, which lay between Peace City and Black Phoenix City.

Locals said it was a land abandoned by the gods, a place of calamity. Fifteen years ago, every village nearby had been reduced to ruins.

In a land rich with spiritual energy, all things of heaven and earth soon reclaimed this place discarded by the world. The areas where houses once stood had been overrun by climbing vines, mysterious and magnificent.

Yet who could have imagined that before all that, this had once been a place of utter yin? All the ghosts that fled the underworld had gathered here, and that was why the villages had been destroyed.

Lian picked up a withered yellow leaf from the ground. Now, there was not the slightest trace of yin energy left in the mountain, and with the Yin Yang Mirror on her person, she could not even see a single wandering spirit.

“Let’s go. This is it.”

The two of them formed the Wind-Riding Seal. A mountain of several thousand feet was nothing to them.

The place chosen by the one-eyed Taoist was truly a hidden paradise. A small wooden house stood abruptly amid the deep forest, strange and lonely.

A fence enclosed the few yards around it. Exotic flowers and rare herbs from the mountain had all been transplanted here and grown in neat plots. Even more unbelievable, he had managed to make every last one of them thrive.

Inside the little courtyard stood many racks, and on each rack hung colorful bottles. This time Lian and Zhong Li could see clearly that the bottles contained ghosts. Some were wreathed in resentment, and all were sealed one by one inside.

They howled. They roared. Yet all of it would be ground down by the seals, then sealed once more into lanterns of flowers and sold into the hands of buyers. They could not be reborn until they had fulfilled the buyers’ wishes, and in the end they would turn into wandering spirits and return to heaven and earth.

The one-eyed Taoist stood before the wooden house, as if he had already expected visitors today.

Zhong Li brought Lian down into the courtyard. The one-eyed Taoist made an inviting gesture, and Lian did not stand on ceremony.

She knew Yun Ranran would not have let the two of them take such a risk without some arrangement below. If things turned dark, then once a real fight broke out, the one-eyed Taoist would definitely not be their match.

And if he came at them openly, that would be even better. Lian had taken a rough look earlier; this Taoist might know a little craft, but his constitution was poor and his cultivation mediocre. Against her and Zhong Li, the result was obvious.

Recently, Little Scoundrel had gone quiet as if hibernating. In the past it had always chirped noisily by her ear, and now that it had suddenly disappeared for a while, she was still not quite used to it. She had no idea what that fellow was up to.

If Little Scoundrel were here, this side would be almost an utterly one-sided victory. After all, it could see through the other party’s background. Know yourself and know your enemy, and you will win every battle.

Still, from all appearances, the one-eyed Taoist did not seem to have any intention of fighting the two of them. It looked as though this would be a battle of words.

The one-eyed Taoist took out tea leaves and brewed fine tea for them. He drank a little first to show that it was not poisoned. Lian had no choice but to take a token sip, while quietly drawing the tea into her spatial realm. Doing that sort of thing now came as naturally as breathing.

A little caution never hurt.

As for Zhong Li, in front of outsiders he was always as cold and still as an ice sculpture. Whether he drank or not, no one would think much of it. And when one considered his cultivation, others would only assume he was naturally proud. That was perfectly normal.

“You have come to my humble dwelling, I presume for the matter of the flower lanterns. If so, why not listen to a story from me?”

The one-eyed Taoist did not move his lips at all, yet his voice still rang out. It was ventriloquism.

Lian raised her brows. This one-eyed Taoist actually had such a skill.

A mist seemed to gather in the one-eyed Taoist’s eye. “I imagine you are curious why I am able to use curse arts to make ghost spirits obey the wishes of the buyer. That story begins ten years ago...”

Ten years ago, evil ghosts had wreaked havoc upon the world, and all across the Nine Provinces there was no peace. One branch of the Sacred Hall took it upon itself to devote itself to the study of Taoist arts. According to regional division, Cui Yu, that is, the one-eyed Taoist, was assigned to the Peace City area.

At that time, because of this Yin Mountain, most of the malevolent ghosts had been drawn here and gathered in this region. Peace City was one of the few places of true peace, living up to its name.

By chance, Cui Yu discovered the first great ghost in Peace City. At that time, the alleyways were eroded by ghostly aura, a scene of utter devastation. Cui Yu exhausted every means he had, and in the end he only barely drove the great ghost away.

The Sacred Hall feared that the great ghost would one day return to Peace City and bring disaster. At once, they ordered a further contingent of Taoists to encircle and destroy it completely, and Cui Yu volunteered to lead the team.

Following the lingering ghost aura, Cui Yu joined with his senior and junior brothers to track it down through the Eight Trigrams and Four Symbols method to Yin Mountain.

The entire mountain range was shrouded in dense yin energy, darkening the sky. Cui Yu worried that there might still be a ghost king-class great ghost within the mountain, and immediately ordered his fellow disciples to withdraw.

But the brothers argued that they had the advantage in numbers, and after one junior brother stirred things up, they abandoned Cui Yu, ignored his warnings, and entered the mountain. Cui Yu waited at the foot of the mountain for several days, but none of those who went in ever came back out.

Cui Yu was both lucky and ashamed. He had no face to return to the Sacred Hall, and so he smeared rotten mud on his face and lived as a beggar, day after day.

Fortunately, the sacrifice of his fellow disciples bought Peace City a brief stretch of peace. As the days passed one by one, Cui Yu also forgot his former occupation.

He had thought he would muddle through this life as a beggar, yet that great ghost returned to Peace City to wreak havoc once more, and its ghostly power had already risen to the level of a ghost king.

Cui Yu followed the crowd of commoners in retreat under the Sacred Hall’s protection, but the instant he stepped out of the city, he turned back and went in again. At that moment, there was no fear in his heart. What he owed from the past would eventually have to be repaid.

The Hall Lord of the Sacred Hall personally came forward and used a sacred relic to temporarily suppress the great ghost’s evil nature, but there was no method to kill it.

Just as everyone was locked in stalemate, Cui Yu stepped forward and threw himself at the great ghost. He was resolved to perish together with it.

As he drew near, the surrounding yin energy surged into Cui Yu’s heart veins, and his entire body suffered as though it would burst apart. Suddenly a voice rang out: “Junior, I shall pass on to you my curse arts. You must kill me, and grant me peace...”

The curse arts then imprinted themselves into his mind. Cui Yu did not hesitate. Enduring the pain, he cast the spell. In the end, just before his body exploded, he refined the great ghost’s resentment. With a thunderous detonation, the great ghost vanished from heaven and earth.

To avoid the Sacred Hall, Cui Yu slipped out of Peace City in secret. In that battle, he lost one eye and his voice, and from beginning to end, no one in the Sacred Hall ever knew.

Afterward, Cui Yu mastered the curse arts. Only when fragments of memory occasionally surfaced in his mind did he understand that these curse arts had been created by the great ghost itself. Yet after death it had remained unwilling, fled the underworld, and, burned by yin energy, risen to become a ghost king, losing its reason and bringing disaster to a whole region.

The sacred relic of the Sacred Hall had restored to it the last shred of sanity it possessed before the destruction of the city. It had passed its curse arts on to Cui Yu, only to be brought to an end by the very curse it had created.

Cui Yu did not wish to return to the Sacred Hall. He also hoped to fulfill the wish the great ghost had held in life: to bring all evil ghosts under heaven back to the world and dispel their resentment.

Cui Yu suspected they could not enter the underworld, and that the underworld itself seemed to have no one managing it either.

Thus Cui Yu went alone to Yin Mountain, climbing from the foot to the summit. Using curse arts and gaining new realizations along the way, he subdued ghost spirits and used flower lanterns to realize their final worth.

Dear reader, this chapter is now complete. Wishing you an enjoyable read.